Narendra Modi is addressing 400 CEOs in New Delhi and is also the chief guest at Cybermedia ICT Awards, a prestigious award which aims at recognizing and encouraging leaders who have built the Indian ICT Industry.

The Indian IT/ITES Industry’s potential to achieve over $300 billion in revenues by 2020 will contribute 6 percent of India’s annual GDP and 28 percent of annual exports.

For heavy growth prospects the IT/ITES industry recommends the following policy initiatives:

1, Building India as the Innovation Cradle of the world: Allocate 2 percent of national budget for research & development and create quality institutions to increase PhD holders to 200,000 by 2020. Enhanced budget outlay for IPR creation with the help of Industry partnership

2. Invest in hardware engineering & semiconductor capabilities which will create upward and downward innovation opportunities for IT Industry.
Emergence of competition from Low cost, Near Shore countries

3. lack of a supportive fiscal environment with a long- term policy framework: To help IT industry move up the value chain for software importing nations, create an environment to promote IT/software product development in India through closer working relationships between top government/public sector organizations like: ISRO, BARC, HAL, and ONGC. Tax breaks to IT Companies initiating product development initiatives to: Harness ICT for inclusive growth & help build domestic market; Create National Information Infrastructure; and Blueprint for IT enabled solutions for public services efficacy.

4. Creating employment and enhancing employability of Indian youth: Indian IT/ITES industry’s potential to generate a direct/indirect employment to 30 million by 2020. By FY13, the industry employed about 3 million people directly and around 9.5 million indirectly. Tighter integration with IT industry and select high repute foreign universities to design the curriculum for future. Also include training the faculty.

5. Improve urban infrastructure and public services in Tier II, III cities: Infrastructure development is largely constrained to the nine cities, which contribute more than 95 percent of India’s exports and development of tier 2/3 cities has not taken off in a planned manner. Improve urban infrastructure and public services in 10-15 Tier II, III cities.